Decipher, p.50
Decipher, page 50
Pearce kept shaking his head. “This is incredible.”
“Is this what you saw?” Hackett asked, referring to the remote viewing sessions the man had performed for the CIA.
“Better.”
But Matheson, always the engineer, spotted something that didn’t make sense. All along the walls of the great curved hall were alcoves and arches, tubular constructs and what could only be described as oversized vials. Not load-bearing elements but rather vessels for containing something and, at some point, perhaps even releasing that something. “What the hell are those things?” he asked aloud.
They all studied them without breaking their stride, Gant insistent that they keep moving forward. “There’s gotta be a way down into the city. There has to be. We need to find a door,” he told them.
But the vials were eating up the group’s attention and it became clear to everybody that Scott and Sarah were finding them particularly fascinating.
And that was when Scott nodded, saying, “Oh yeah, you’re right.” It was obvious he was replying to some sort of observation. “That makes perfect sense.” It was like he was locked deep in conversation. But with whom?
“Uh, Richard?” Hackett interrupted uneasily. “I hate to break it to you, but, uh, buddy, you’re really freaking us all out here.” Scott didn’t seem to understand. “Who are you talking to?” Hackett asked.
Scott jerked his thumb like it was perfectly obvious who. He even looked to Sarah for confirmation and she seemed to be agreeing with him.
“Can’t you hear them?” he said.
Gant pulled the group to a halt, concerned. “Hear what?”
Scott shrugged. “The voices.”
Perhaps it hadn’t been the best thing to say.
“No, Richard,” Hackett confirmed without the slightest hint of irony. “No, we can’t hear the voices.”
VAR
A chill wind swept through the Great Hall. Gant had his sonic artifact snapped up and ready at a frightening speed. It had not taken any of them very long to get used to the idea that any type of breeze near such large expanses of Carbon 60 was the prelude to something nasty.
But Sarah stepped in this time. Quickly and gently she pressed her hand down on Gant’s. “It’s okay,” she explained. “They’re just trying to communicate.”
“Who are?” Hackett insisted. “Sarah, who is trying to communicate?”
“Oh my Lord,” Pearce murmured as the lightshow along the entire breadth and length of the floor mutated into a kaleidoscope of animated images.
It was like standing on a glass floor as a sea of intricate pictures swirled in a chaotic soup below. But these were not two-dimensional, pixellated pictures, as on TV. These images were three-dimensional and as sharp and as crisp as real solid objects. It was as though, if there were a trap door in the ground, they could pull it open and it would be possible to step right on inside, or even hold out a hand and lift these people out.
Because that’s what they were seeing. People. An infinite ocean of faces jostling for position and trying to peer through the glass at them. Some had their cheeks and noses squashed, pressed up against the barrier that separated the two worlds. Others swam in the background, trying to get a better look from afar. But all had their eyes trained on the group.
They seemed ghostly for the most part. Pale. Like the blueness of the crystal floor had given them all a color-wash. But every now and then traces of flesh-tones and hair and eye coloring would bleed through. There were men and there were women. Old and young. Children and mothers. Fathers and uncles. They all kept opening and closing their mouths as if they were deep in conversation with the group. Their lips moved solidly as they tried to form words and at first all that was produced was a subtle vibrating of the walls, followed shortly thereafter by a wind that grew in intensity as the oscillations grew.
But soon a kind of far-off rumble started echoing around the hall as so many voices all speaking at once became one almighty roar. It sounded like the sea. Wave after wave crashing onto the shore.
Hackett couldn’t believe his own eyes. “Talk about the original ghosts in the machine,” he wheezed.
Not everybody’s reaction was the same. Matheson dropped to his knees and pressed his hands against the glass-like floor as if in an effort to reach out and actually touch the past, his face a picture of childlike wonder. Meanwhile November had taken to spinning on her heels and watching as the tide of noises and faces pulsated across the floor. Exhilarated, more than once she had to force herself to gulp down breaths of air.
Yun merely trembled. In Cantonese he kept yelling: “This is what I warned you all about! This is what I was afraid of! You see? The spirits of the dead have returned to crush us!”
Scott turned on the soldier, telling him to calm down, but there was no consoling the young man. Instead, Scott was confronted by the CIA agent among them.
“Richard, what the hell is going on here?”
Scott beamed: “Meet the former population of Atlantis.” But no sooner had the smile spread across Scott’s face, than it was wiped off.
Something was wrong. Seriously wrong.
It had started off when he had heard the giggle of a small child, a little girl. Scott had made out the sound of her footsteps as she ran down the Great Hall toward him. But there was nobody there. So she giggled again as if she knew it would confuse him before finally she whispered in his ear.
But when Scott had swung around and realized there was nobody there, instinctively he knew, at some deep level, that the only place he could possibly be hearing anything was inside his own mind.
As he walked the length of the hall with the others it had become increasingly evident that this was one of the most sophisticated sound systems he’d ever encountered. A different voice had been allocated and was being broadcast within any cubic foot of space within the three dimensions of the Great Hall, length, breadth and height.
In fact, his very advancement down the hall had been triggering more and more voices into effect.
Rapidly, voice had built upon voice until it was like standing in the middle of a sports stadium that was not only filled to capacity, but every single person’s voice in that stadium carried equal clarity, volume and weight.
It was, quite simply, enough to send a person clinically insane. Scott could feel his entire brain shooting rapidly toward sensory overload. The Carbon 60 in his leg had fused into his nervous system. He was plugged directly into Atlantis’s tree of knowledge. And there was nothing he could do about it.
But most disturbing of all was the chorus of frantic voices. Their petrified memories and half-formed words, most of which he barely understood, seemed to penetrate his psyche at such a deep level that words were frankly meaningless. For his senses and his emotions were being overtaken, and the full horror of what the people of Atlantis wished to reveal to him was unveiled within his mind.
And all this within a split second. To call it a rush was to misunderstand the concept. To call it a mad scramble for his attention was to approach the sense of what the situation was trying to convey but ultimately failed to deliver. For Scott was undergoing an assault of gigantic proportions, verging on rape of the mind.
Yet the message was loud and clear: Atlantis is under attack from its own creations. The very purpose of its existence is being undermined.
Hackett and the others rushed forward. Although Scott didn’t know it, he had collapsed to the ground and was convulsing as if in the throes of an epileptic fit. Mucus and blood kept snorting from his nose and mouth. His whole body was wracked with such ferocious shudders, some of his companions were not even sure they wanted to go near him.
“They know we’re here,” Sarah explained desperately, crouching down to try and help Scott. “They can hear him, they can hear me.”
Hackett was concerned. “What are they doing to him that they’re not doing to you, Sarah?”
“They can hear us both, but he’s the only one who can speak their language. They’re ignoring me. It’s like I don’t exist.” She explained briefly how the Carbon 60 in her shoulder had worked its way into her nervous system and was using low frequency waves to communicate with the Great Hall.
“They’re not real,” Sarah told them all. “These people are memories—animated memories of people. They’re a computer program.”
November stroked Scott’s hair, tears welling up in her eyes. “Make them stop, please. They’re hurting him.”
Gant motioned at the expanse in either direction. “Stop them—how?”
Hackett considered what Sarah had to say and conferred with Matheson and Pearce. “What do you think? To encode an entire person is a massive amount of computer storage space. To encode an entire society?”
“These people have mastered molecular manipulation,” Matheson pointed out, distracted for a moment by Scott’s labored, ragged breathing.
Hackett was in agreement. Beyond a certain scale of miniaturization, tininess became a problem for electronic components. Wires clogged with chaotic electrons like cholesterol in arteries. Transistors barely functioned. So ultra-small circuitry required a completely different design, one that relied on using quantum-mechanical effects to manage data. Computers that either used light switches and made use of the lattice structures of crystals—or computers that used chemical reactions in processes that mimicked the human mind.
And then it dawned on Hackett. What if they were dealing with a machine that did both? That worked at the speed of light, but had chemical elements, and in essence operated like a brain. If Scott was useful to the machine, then the only way to save him might be to remove him from the machine.
Pearce was careful where he stepped, still conferring with Matheson. “So these are like holograms, right? Optical illusions?”
“Right.”
But Hackett interrupted. “Start looking for a door,” he commanded. “We haven’t got much time so we can’t go back the way we came. We have to move forward. We’ve just got to get Scott out of this chamber. Out of contact with this part of the city.” He jerked a thumb at Pearce’s sonic artifact. “If you know how to use that thing, go to it.”
Everyone spread out and started making their way along the walls of the Great Hall in a desperate attempt to find an exit. But try as they might, no amount of instructing what appeared to be doors to open, seemed to work. Matheson even ran his fingers around the rim of what seemed to be a door-frame. Nothing. He stood back from it and studied it intently.
And that was when it happened.
The vials and crystal canisters that were attached in their thousands along each wall of the Great Hall suddenly started moving. Shifting into position and locking into place within long, convoluted glass-like tubes.
“Ralph?” Pearce groaned. “What did you touch this time?”
“Nothing!” Matheson panicked. “I didn’t touch a thing.”
“What’s going on?” Gant demanded, frantic. “What is this place?”
And that’s when Scott’s contorted face seemed to clear a bit. He stopped shaking and shuddering, like he’d managed to regain some sort of control. He sat up gingerly and wiped his face on his sleeve, taking several long deep breaths before speaking. But when he did his voice was strained, evidence that he was still undergoing some enormous struggle that was taking its toll. He looked up at them all.
“The doors are locked because I locked them,” he explained weakly.
“Richard, why would you do that?” Hackett asked suspiciously.
“Because this is the Var,” came the response.
Gant was cautious, trying to assess exactly where the next threat might be coming from. “A Var? What the hell is a var, Professor?”
“Are you okay?” Hackett asked quickly.
Scott didn’t bother answering, as if to do so would be to break his focus. “In the Old Testament,” he said, “when the Great Flood was imminent, God instructed Noah to build an Ark, a boat, and place in it pairs of every animal that lived so that they might be saved. But earlier Middle Eastern traditions have it that Yima, their version of Noah, was actually ordered to build a Var. Avestic Aryan tradition in Iran has it that this Var was an underground place linking the four corners of the earth. Zoroastrian tradition speaks of the Var being more like a fortress.”
“But the animals were still brought in two by two, right?” Hillman demanded.
“No,” Scott shook his head. “The Var was designed to contain the seed of every living thing on earth.”
Matheson shot the linguist a look. “The seed? Like DNA samples? Maybe even eggs and semen?” The engineer rushed over to the odd-looking vials attached at intervals along the walls. “My God—every species we’ve managed to wipe out over the last few thousand years … we could bring ’em all back. Mastodons, Toxodons, Mammoths, Saber-Toothed Tigers—everything from the last 12,000 years, bring ’em all back—even the Dodo. I always liked the Dodo.” He confronted the others. “Do you know what this means?”
But Hackett was way ahead of him and even had his hands raised in apprehension. “Ralph, that may not be such a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Look around you. The earth is a constantly evolving biosphere. Assuming we make it through the next few hours to be able to release what’s in these containers, consider what you’d be doing. We have no way of knowing what’s really in these vials for sure. We could be unleashing diseases and viruses that haven’t been seen in millennia, things that maybe died out, and that we no longer have a resistance to. We’d be wiping ourselves out.”
November agreed. “When the Conquistadors landed in the Americas, many of the indigenous populations were killed through the spread of disease, not war.”
“The other option is we could wind up recreating insects that seem harmless enough but have a devastating effect on the food-chain. You can’t just open up a canister and say: ‘Here, have a Mammoth.’ You have to consider the consequences.”
Gant said: “So what you’re saying is, assuming we get through all this alive, this place is still going to be a ticking time bomb.”
“Oh here we go,” Matheson grumbled. “Any excuse to blow the place up.”
“Shut up!” Scott bellowed, trying to get to his feet and ultimately winding up flailing around on the floor. He scowled at some of the faces peering up at him through the floor, and like the eye-stalks on snails, they retreated.
November reached over and helped him up. He staggered, breathless, like he’d been sucker-punched in the chest. “Just shut up! Quit arguing and listen to me. You’re not listening!”
Unsteady on his feet, Scott tried to breathe again as they all watched him expectantly. Matheson edged forward as Scott wheezed.
“Tell us what we need to do, Richard,” the engineer offered meekly. “Just tell us what we need to do and we’ll do it.”
“I need you to understand,” Scott said simply. “I need you all to listen because when I open these doors there’s a good chance none of us will be making it back out alive.
“This Great Hall is like the Tree of Knowledge, the repository of all things physical and metaphysical. Right now, I’m plugged into a vast bank of information that I can access with a single thought. Now, everything that these people were, everything that these people knew—I know.
“This Var serves a dual purpose. In the event that humankind made it, that we progressed far enough to understand how to use this place since the last Great Catastrophe, our knowledge can be expanded infinitely and we will be permitted access to this knowledge that is rightfully ours.
“But in the event that we fail to instruct the central command center of this city that we even exist and need saving, then this machine will enforce its other role. It will release back into the environment genetic material intended to re-seed life all over this planet. But the life that it was supposed to re-seed has been changed. Altered, by the very creations the people of Atlantis built to protect their city. These nanoes are alive—and they don’t want to die. They are waiting for us behind these doors—and when I open them—they will try to kill us.”
EVOLUTION
“They’ve already tried to kill us,” Gant spat.
November was shaking. “Dr. Scott,” she said, “you’re really starting to scare me. You don’t even sound like yourself.”
“I’m scaring you?” It was almost funny, Scott thought. “November, I’m the least of your worries.”
“Richard,” Hackett said, “you don’t look so hot.”
“What’s the matter, Jon? Jealous the voices in my head aren’t talking to you?”
As he said this the faces along the length of the floor began to move again. Crawling up the walls, they warped and twisted until they coalesced once more into whole bodies—entire people seen in actual size, wearing the clothing and adornments of their age. A sea of people who stood silent now, and watching. Like spectators at the end of Time. A sea of imprisoned souls who stood just inches away behind a crystal partition.
Scott was showing the group how to most effectively use the sonic artifacts in their possession for defensive work when it was time for them all to press onward.
“The nanoes,” he explained, “were designed to maintain all those structures around the planet. And by necessity they were given limited artificial intelligence. An ability to act collectively and the ability to reproduce.”
Hackett thought as much. “And in so doing, they evolved,” he said, taking over the story. Scott eyed him. That was correct. “Biological complexity theory dictates it takes fifty thousand years to create the human eye from scratch. Twelve thousand years’ worth of evolution in a pre-created species is more than enough to assume these critters have become truly smart little fuckers.”
“Yeah,” Scott agreed. “And they wish to go on evolving. They want their shot at planet Earth. As they see it, we’ve had our turn and we screwed up.”
Hillman slammed another clip into his machine gun. “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” he growled, “and as there aren’t any fat chicks hereabouts, I guess we’re gonna be around for a while yet.”
